Anglo-Celtic Connections

Most of the time, I write about new databases that are of no interest to me or most readers. Life is like a box of chocolates — joy when a new collection appears online for an area of your family history interest. I had one on 18 January with the 15,054,046 names in the North Riding of Yorkshire electoral registers addition on Ancestry.

It includes the major communities of Middlesbrough, Redcar, Whitby, Scarborough and Northallerton and a host of smaller ones like Great Ayton, which is in my family history.

I found my grandmother from 1945 to the year before her death, missing the war years. Her mother, under her married name Cochrane, was included in 1918 and 1919 recorded with her second husband but leaving the new mystery of where they were in the 1920s and most of the 1930s.

The registers include the names of registered voters in the Riding and their place of residence.  Depending on the year, you may find a full street address, the name of a house, the name of the street, or the name of the polling district. Registers weren’t produced in 1916 and 1917 or from 1940 to 1944 because of the two world wars.

The originals are at the North Yorkshire County Record Office, let’s not forget to acknowledge the work of the organizations that preserved and made available the original records, Ancestry almost certainly used OCR to compile the collection.

 

 

There are several factors in estimating the number of descendants of home children from statistics. You have to take into account the number of descendants of a home child, and then their descendants, and so on. At each stage there will be “leakage”.

On average, each home child had a certain number of offspring. Is that the same as for the same age cohort established in Canada?  Could a traumatic childhood have meant home children had fewer offspring on average? It could have meant they died younger before having as many children as the population at large.

Did home children leave Canada in greater numbers than the general Canadian population? Having moved at least once, so being less firmly rooted, they may have been more inclined to seek greener pastures by returning to their roots in the UK or trying their luck in the USA or further afield.

When it comes to the number of descendants it doesn’t matter whether the parent is male or female, but a complicating factor is if the mother and father are both home children.

Say each home child had three children; if both the mother and father were home children, then there would be three home children descendants rather than six.

How often do we have the situation of a home child mother and father? How might they make acquaintance? Perhaps at a church or social event in a small community.

Let’s look at a scenario.

100 boys go to a dance at which there are 100 girls. One of the boys is a home child. How does the chances of him making the best connection with a home child girl depend in the number of home child girls?

If there are no home child girls at the dance it’s zero. If one then it’s one in a hundred, 1%, and so on.

Now suppose twenty home girls are invited to a dance and eighty a non-home-girls. Similarly twenty home boys and eighty non-home boys. What is the probability that at least one home child boy and girl hit it off?

The answer is probability 0.34 or 34%. The calculation is based on conditional probability and the binomial distribution.

It’s probably greater as young people of similar background would likely find commonality of interest enough to be encouraged to get to know each other better than a random person.

The calculation assumes the chance of meeting is random and independent. But it could well be that someone goes to a dance with a buddy, he or she gets to meet someone who also came to the dance with a buddy, and the two buddies are introduced.

While I’ve heard of two home children marrying and having children I know of no statistics. If you do please leave a comment.

All these factors suggest fewer home child descendants than indicated by naive estimates.

OGS Toronto Branch hosts leading genealogist, as well as newspaper editor and publisher, Dave Obee, for its first online monthly meeting of 2024 on Monday, 22 January, at 7:30 pm.

We likely agree with him about remembering the basics of genealogical research. But do you agree when he recommends foregoing the fun of the latest bright, shiny things, like AI?  Would he have said the same thing when DNA came on the scene? Let’s not fall into the trap of prioritizing the negative, which is the bread and butter of the news business.

https://torontofamilyhistory.org/event/the-road-ahead/

Note: The image was produced by DALL E 3.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Ancestry has added a collection of 114,110 Winnipeg, Canada Burial Records Index, 1878-2022 for Brookside, St. Vital and Transcona cemeteries sourced from  https://legacy.winnipeg.ca/cemeteries/search/default.stm

Ontario – Librarians propose provincewide digital library
Base funding for libraries from the province has not increased in more than 25 years.

Popular Toronto neighbourhoods & landmarks in the early 1900s

JPEG, GIF, or PNG? Image File Types Explained and Tested

Digital Sundial.

BIFHSGO members likely received an email from Membership Director Anne Coulter, with instructions on how to restore access to member services. That includes adding a new password. I’m not sure everyone was impacted, but if you didn’t receive her email you may want to check your spam file.

Anne assures me there was no cyber attack so no personal information was compromised.

Sheffield Ancestry? If so, the 32,437 new records released this week by FMP, sourced from Sheffield City Archives and Local Studies Library, may help.

Yorkshire, Sheffield Workhouse Admissions 1700-1915

This new set consists of 29,003 transcript of the vital details taken from the workhouse and poor law records held at the Sheffield Archives. Most transcripts will include::

Name
Birth year
Year – the year the event took place
Document title – this will indicate the type of record your ancestor’s name appeared in
Occupation
Other details – this may include a physical description or details about the individual’s circumstances that brought them to the poor law union.
Document reference – the reference number will help you find the original document at the Sheffield Archives.

Yorkshire, Sheffield Crime Courts and Convicts 1737-1938

This week sees the addition of  2,185 transcriptions, Records usually include the following information:

Name
Birth year
Age
Place
Event date
Year
Document reference
Document title
Other details.

The total collection now has 208,235 entries. Other details include  the nature of the offence, such as attempted suicide, deserter, disorderly apprentice, drunk and wilful damage, footbal (225 offences), maintenance arrears, cricket (29 offences), stealing, theft, and vagrancy.

Yorkshire, Sheffield Social and Institutional Records 1558-1939
This collection is augmented with 1,259 records consisting of exam records from the Norton Free School. Find first name(s), last name, birth year, age, year and reference to an archives file.
The total in the collection is now 49,248 entries

One project amongst the Library and Archives Canada’s Co-Lab Challenges reported progress.

Ancestry’s England and Wales, Death Index, 1989-2022 has been updated to 7,166,817 records. That’s from 6,947,083 entries last August.

The corresponding Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2022 now has 916,681 records, updated from 897,449 entries.

A search provides name, gender, age, birth date, last residence (town), postal code district and death date. The source is not specified but appears to be compilations from unofficial records, such as funeral homes and newspapers,  from GreyPower Deceased Data and Wilmington Millennium, West Yorkshire. I estimate it covers about half the deaths occurring.

Yesterday I quoted a recent BBC article. Another quote from that article is “The child migration scheme sent a group of 100,000 impoverished children from Britain to overseas colonies between 1869 and the 1940s.”

That’s “overseas colonies” not just Canada. How many of those came to Canada?

The British Home Child Registry states “an estimated over 100,000 children were emigrated from the United Kingdom to Canada.”

The graph below is compiled from data at the British Home Child Registry and archived from that site through the archive.org Wayback Machine.

Since 2020 it has remained at over 83,000 entries in the database. As stated at the site “the Registry is updated online at least weekly.” There have been adjustments, down as well as up since 2020.

Where will the additional 17,000 be found? Could there be missing years? Unfortunately it isn’t possible to search that database by year of migration.

Two other sources are worthy of attention.

Library and Archives Canada states that “Between 1869 and the late 1930s, over 100,000 juvenile migrants were sent to Canada from the British Isles during the child emigration movement.” The Home Child Records database “provides access to more than 245,000 names of Home Children from records held at Library and Archives Canada and elsewhere.”

The much larger number is because it indexes mentions. A person may be the subject of entries in different sources — passenger lists, inspection reports, lists from immigrating agencies, death compilations, and more.

A database I’d overlooked is Canada, Home Children Immigration Records Index, 1869-1930 from Findmypast. It includes 125,086 results. Findmypast acquired this collection when it purchased Mocavo in 2016.

A couple of things to watch for in this FMP database. 80 records for the Liverpool Sheltering Home have no date given. The records turn up in all years from 1869 to 1930. The total of 125,086 accounts for that. Also, the collection includes many who had no association with a home, they were just (relatively) young people. That includes my 15 year old great uncle who arrived in 1903 bound for a relative in Saskatchewan.

Some were not that young. For example, the median age of the 24 immigrants from the Dublin Union & Dublin by Lamplight Institution in 1869 is 22.5 years. Likely different sources use different ages as cut-off or other criteria such as whether the child/person came in a party brought by an agency.

I’m doubtful there were as many as 100,000 home children, as properly defined, who arrived in Canada between 1869 and the start of WW2.

 

 

 

A recent BBC article included the sentence: “An estimated 10% of Canada’s population – around 4 million people – are descendants of the British Home Children.”

That’s a figure that is challenging to estimate. But it isn’t difficult to show how outlandish that 10% is.

Census Perspective

The population of Canada in 1869, the year that Maria Susan Rye brought the first party of children to Canada, was about 3.6 million. Canada’s population in 2024 is about 40 million. This means that the population increased by a factor of 11.11 over 155 years.

Assume that 100,000 arrived in 1869, the top of the range quoted in the British Home Children Registry for the total of those who came pre-WW2. Multiplying 100,000 by 11.11 produces an estimate of 1.1 million, or 2.75% of the present population.

This is an overestimate as not only did all children not arrive in 1869, but the total  population increased more by immigration than natural growth. 

All Home Children and All Descendants

Take 100,000 arrivals in 1869, but assume the death rate set to zero. That counts all the original home child immigrants and all their descendants, with births continuing to parents regardless of their age. Using crude birth rate stats, I chose those published by Barry Edmonston, Canadian Studies in Population 41, No. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 2014):1–37, the total is 3,340,000. That’s 8.35% of Canada’s current population, still less than 10%.

Making the best estimate

These two scenarios show that 10% is outside the range of possibilities.To make a best estimate would require statistics on the number of children arriving in each age range year-by-year, the number leaving Canada by age year-by-year, and statistics for birth and death rates by age in Canada, back to 1869, year-by-year.  Such stats don’t exist.

Even the total number of home children arriving is uncertain, quoted as anything from 80,000 to 130,000.

As regard the 10% claim, I’m remined of the quote attributed to Joseph Goebbels,  “Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.”

Updates to newspapers.com in the past month continue to focus on 2023 . Otherwise, there were no updates for England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Australia or New Zealand.

For Canada, for earlier years, The Standard, St. Catharines, Ontario, was updated to 1,027,597 pages, 1891–2014.

Fishwrap, the newspapers.com blog, posted Kiss a Chimney Sweep for Luck: 6 Fascinating British Superstitions.

Two items that got missed from Tuesday’s list

Friday, 19 January

7 pm: What’s New With Family Tree Maker by Mark Olsen for OGS Niagara Peninsula Branch.
https://niagara.ogs.on.ca/events/niagara-peninsula-branch-monthly-webinar-series-2024-01-19/

Saturday, 20 January

11 am: Isle of Man Research, by Dan Poffenberger for the British Interest Group of Wisconsin and Illinois.
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrf-uhqTwqGtADV-L73yR4JZai6s69dE3G